The construction of international reality

Richard K. Ashley ¹ and Robert Cox’s ² critiques of Kenneth Waltz’s neorealism had already announced the beginning of a new era in IR: the strong rationalist focus of the 1970s and early 1980s was now progressively opening up to something new. As had often been the case since the origins of the discipline, the theoretical and conceptual innovations of the 1990s were imports from other disciplines, mostly social theory, but also cultural studies, anthropology and linguistics. The disciplinary oligopoly of law, history and economics was now giving way to different disciplines and new contributions. Many of those developed within what the disciplinary orthodoxy decided to label as ‘radical’ approaches – critical theory, feminism, poststructuralism and postcolonialism (the next chapter will delve into some of those innovations). A clear and slightly less ‘radical’ mark in the discipline’s evolution, however, was the centrality that social constructivism, building on the social theory works of Berger and Luckmann, ³ John Searle ⁴ and Anthony Giddens ⁵ as well as on the linguistic approaches put forward by J.L Austin ⁶ in the late 1960s, assumed in the discipline. Nicholas Onuf, ⁷ Peter Katzenstein, ⁸ Alexander Wendt ⁹ and Friedrich Kratochwil ¹⁰ were among the IR pioneers in that regard. They were soon to be followed by an impressive list of authors, such as Martha Finnemore, ¹¹ Stefano Guzzini, ¹² Karin Fierke ¹³ and Jutta Weldes. ¹⁴ Some journals, such as the European Journal of International Relations became strongholds for the constructivist ‘cause,’ and by the end of the 1990s it was already clear that Europe and to a lesser extent the United States had embraced these authors’ ideas.